U.S. Flood Risk Model To Be Accessible To Public

A climate research organization will offer access to a risk model that predicts the probability of flooding for homes across the United States, giving the public a look at the data institutional investors use to gauge risk.

First Street Foundation on Tuesday launched Flood Lab firststreet.org/flood-lab, a research partnership which provides eight universities with its model that maps previous instances of flooding as well as future risks.

Using the dataset, Wharton business school at the University of Pennsylvania, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Johns Hopkins University among others will quantify the impacts of flooding on the U.S. economy.

The move could put pressure on prices of homes, municipal bonds and mortgage-backed securities linked to real estate in risk-prone areas, according to Matthew Eby, executive director of research organization First Street Foundation, and other Flood Lab participants.

The data will be made available to the public in the first half of 2020 in an online database searchable by home address.